"Gnosticism has always appealed to intellectuals. Freud offered a particularly succulent variety. He had a brilliant gift for classical allusion and imagery at a time when all educated people prided themselves on their knowledge of Greek and Latin. He was quick to seize on the importance attached to myth by the new generation of social anthropologists such as Sir James Frazer, whose The Golden Bough began to appear in 1890. The meaning of dreams, the function of myth - into this potent brew Freud stirred an all-pervading potion of sex, which he found at the root of almost all human behavior. The war had loosened tongues over sex; the immediate post-war period saw the habit of sexual discussion carried into print. Freud's time had come. He had, in addition to his literary gifts, some of the skills of a sensational journalist. He was an adept neologian. He could mint a striking slogan. Almost as often as his younger contemporary Rudyard Kipling, he added words and phrases to the language: 'the unconscious', 'infantile sexuality,' the 'Oedipus complex', 'inferiority complex', 'guilt complex', the ego, the id and the super-ego, 'sublimation,' 'depth-psychology.'"
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Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (1991), ISBN 9780060168339
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gnosticism
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Gnosticism
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